Coincidence?

See if you can identify a thread through all of this:

Sewage Saturates Sadr City as Billions Fail to Reconstruct Iraq (Bloomberg)

Almost six years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, sewers in the sprawling Baghdad slum have become the most odorous example of how things don’t get done in Iraq. While the U.S. has been able to pacify once-roiled areas, electricity is still spotty, drinking water is scarce and health care is limited — even though America has spent billions of dollars on reconstruction and the Iraqi government has taken in hundreds of millions of dollars in oil revenue.

Raw sewage has become something of an emblem for Sadr City, home to 2 million of Baghdad’s 5 million inhabitants. It has swamped streets since at least the early 1990s, flowing freely even as Saddam built himself eight Taj Mahal-scale palace compounds.

The sludge seeped on after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, when American warriors-turned-plumbers tried repeatedly to unclog the works. In 2004, troops pulled a dead horse from one sewer, according to a report on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Web site.

I know we should expect better than Sadr City, but so far, I cannot say we have seen it.

I am starting to get the sneaking suspicion that the same people who planned the war in Iraq and the occupancy are now hard at work, planning for the Federal credit crisis bailout . . .

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